if Gore had demanded a statewide recount then he would likely have won (there would have been less of a reason for the courts to step in)
Demanding a state-wide recount would not have changed the fact that Gore was trying to override the process already in place and agreed to, determined by the people who had the authority to determine the process, and would have pushed the second Florida vote certification past the date of the Electoral College. That would have disenfranchised every Florida voter.
The fact remains, SCOTUS did not "pick a winner", they told the loser that he had already had his recount and they could not overturn the constitutionally recognized authority of the Florida legislature to determine the process for selecting electors for the Electoral College in the state of Florida.
in exchange for a monopoly over a given geographical region,
Example, please? I keep looking for these exclusive franchise agreements and I can't find them. Every one of them I've looked at, and been involved in, has been non-exclusive.
but renegotiating them is tough.
They are contracts between the cable provider and the municipality, and they don't get "renegotiated" until near the end of the existing contract. Renegotiating them happens on a regular basis, it just may be a ten year cycle.
Their fixed costs would be lower because they wouldn't be spending money on producing or buying shows that don't have enough viewers to justify it. Supply and demand 101.
Failure number 3: just because you don't want to watch a certain channel doesn't mean nobody else wants to watch it. Cable companies buy product, so they don't save in production; they still have to pay the producers. Their costs don't go away just because you don't order a channel ala carte.
I've been 100% OTA for decades. I don't *need* to watch any particular show.
That's nice. You're now part of the group that pops up every time cable programming is discussed who tells us that we should just drop cable because you personally get by without it just fine. We're all glad that you get by with just OTA, but other people have other tastes and wants. I don't particularly like coffee, but I don't tell others how they ought to stop drinking it.
My experience with OTA is that I get 7 channels -- none of them major broadcast networks -- on a good day. Usually it is 5, and one of those is the public TV system rebroadcasting the public radio station. YMMV.
Cable companies in Sweden still wanting to bundle channels so that people have to pay for shows they don't want. Do YOU like to pay for something you don't want?
This demonstrates two misunderstandings of the system. First, what makes you think prices would go down if you got only the channels that you wanted to watch? They wouldn't. There are fixed costs that everyone has to cover. Add in the cost of changing the billing system to deal with ala carte, and the number of customer support people who would have to be hired to deal with billing errors and churn.
Second, everyone gets channels they don't watch in this system, so while you think you are paying to subsidize all the channels you don't like, so does everyone who watches those channels but not the ones you do like. Everyone thinks they're subsidizing each other, and in a sense they are. Remove the subsidies from everyone and everyone would pay the same. In fact, those who watch less popular channels would have to pay more since there would no longer be a subsidy from the others.
Someone else pointed out that even Netflix bundles, and the only counter to that was someone who pointed out how great Netflix was for other reasons, as if that excused the bundling.
Unfortunately, if you do ever get a cable system that only carries the popular stuff and doesn't force anyone to pay for things that nobody would watch, I suspect that you'll be unhappy. I'd bet that the things you like most are not the most popular channels. I can pretty much prove that. If you don't like what the OTA channels have on them, then every show they carry is an example of something that is popular with more people than what you want to watch. If what you wanted to watch was that popular, it would be on OTA. And no, public TV is not an example of this process, since public TV content is not determined by general popularity, it's determined by the popularity amongst donors.
Just go and ask them to let you use your TV's built-in ClearQAM tuner instead and see what they say!
Comcast will say "fine, connect all the digital-ready TVs you want to your cable connection." You'll be paying for access to programming you can't decrypt, and they'll have no maintenance issues with you because you are CPE and they don't have to fix any of that. You are almost pure profit for them!
Of course, when you call and ask where the "on demand" TV services are, they'll tell you that you don't get those because you need a settop box for that. Less demand on the servers, so you're still a profit for them.
WHY oh WHY would a cable company need to have the service staying up while I am not watching?
Also to keep the program guide updated.
Always wondered if the CC was using my boxes as Wireless access points, without my knowledge.
Very simple to check for yourself. Do any of your portable WiFi devices show a very strong signal on an unknown SSID when held near your cable box? But the set top box isn't the access point, it will be a cable modem supplied by the cable company.
Some departments use to have alternate channels that where not published before digital bands that they would switch to when needed.
All channels are published in the sense that you can search the FCC database for a geographic area and find out what is licensed for use. Yes, unlicensed use happens, but it is the exception not the rule.
"Can't handle the mail"? What does that even mean?
That means that the mail app I use (also K9) chokes when trying to access my mail email server. "Can't handle" seems like a good, non-technical description. It was intended to convey the idea that not only do I not use my phone for "checking mail", I cannot.
This statement shows poor thought processes. Calling 911 to get information about an event is a missus of 911.
And this statement shows a lack of reading comprehension. I didn't say I would call 911 to get information. I would call 911 to report a series of explosions -- except I found out what they were and that I didn't need to call by listening to unencrypted police radio traffic.
If you don't need immediate help don't call 911.
I think reporting explosions of unknown origin is a valid use of 911. You don't seem to think so. The large number of people who did call to report them disagree. The manager of the PSAP also disagrees with you. Nobody said that nobody should have reported them, they said that the fire department should have been proactive in informing the public they were going to happen. YYMV.
Not what I am talking about. The issue is suspects getting away because they can avoid police by knowing where the police are.
Yes, it is what you are talking about. If I, in a calm, quiet environment cannot determine where just one state police car is waiting with radar, why would you expect a robber, in the heat of pursuit, would be able to monitor and decipher the police communications better? But it's moot -- they don't do it anyway. Maybe because they understand that it isn't as valuable a source of data as you seem to think it is?
If it happens once a year it isa justification for encrypting year round.
Well, that's one opinion. Being able to monitor the activities of the police is a better justification for not encrypting at all.
Which means that there are some agencies who do not use digital systems and need encrypted communications.
No, it means that there are some agencies that use digital data terminals instead of transmitting everything via unencrypted voice signals. In other words, there is a solution to the "privacy" problem that doesn't require encryption of voice traffic. And "do not use digital systems" is irrelevant. Analog, digital, voice is voice.
True but that issue has been worked out long ago.
Textbook solutions are great, in theory, but do not always make it into practice, in practice. The issue of key management is much more complex than the issue of which subaudible tone or NAC (digital "tone") is used on a channel, and the latter is sometimes wrong. For example, a neighboring county changed a CTCSS tone on one of their channels and didn't tell anyone -- and it was only discovered when a local agency went to render mutual aid and couldn't communicate.
they just switch to an unencrypted channel.
So in the middle of an emergency event where you've called in outside assistance, everyone has to change channels, assuming that it becomes obvious that someone who cannot communicate with you cannot communicate with you.
The few times this happens does not make encryption useless.
it actively tries to impress upon the user that the https connection with a self signed certificate is worse than a plain text http connection,
But it doesn't make that comparison. It tells you when a site is saying "trust me because I say I'm trustworthy". It says nothing about a site that says "I'm making no claims at all about trust." That's not saying that one is better than the other, just that one is something that the user needs to know about ("hey, this is https so it's secure, right?") and the other is the default.
My position on this is that FF goes to great length to make it seem that an https connection with a self signed certificate is less secure than http,
That's not what it says. That's your inference because you forget that http says nothing about security at all. How can you be less secure than "none"?
As a T-Mobile customer, I can tell you that I've never watched Netflix on my phone, and it can't handle the mail. So, I always use my phone for something other than watching Netflix and checking email. Mostly I use it... as a phone, and I get SMS texts on it. Works great for both.
And, at times, I use it as a NAP so my more capable tablet can be used for email or other network browsing.
Binge On benefits consumers and those content providers that choose to participate. This is a Good Thing. Getting rid of Binge On would change nothing for the providers who chose not to participate, so they get no benefit out of getting rid of it.
As for the "throttling", it is throttling that still supports streaming video while allowing other users and services access to the bandwidth. You're getting to do what the system was designed for. It isn't "download a really big file really fast so you can then spend an hour watching it...".
It would be better if they lowered the cost per gigabyte of metered data to something reasonable,
Since there are no overage charges for most customers, the "cost per gigabyte" is the cost of your data plan divided by the number of gigabytes you actually use. You can lower the "cost per gigabyte" yourself by downloading more data. If you say "but I'm using all the data I want already", then why would lowering the cost per gigabyte change anything? If you're not using all the data you want, use more. It don't cost nothin'.
I'd prefer my employer didn't know the contents of what I post to Slashdot.
So you use https://whatever.public.forum.... And your employer monitors your packets and sees a large number of packets to that address at times X, Y, and Z, and then scans the public forum for any posting close to time X, Y, and Z. They might see five different names at each time, but the intersection of those three sets will most likely be... you.
Now, that evidence might not stand up in a court of law to convict you of anything, but your employer isn't going to care about that level of proof. You want to keep your employer from knowing what you are posting, you're already using a VPN, so the https part is irrelevant.
You can extend this to just about any forum where ideas are exchanged.
Not every website is a forum where ideas are exchanged. Not every website deals in personal or private data of any kind. Some websites are as simple as 'xtide', which allows you to select a location and a time and get back predicted tides. Pretty useful stuff.
I run an xtide server. I had to hack the source to put in a robots.txt so that indexers stopped beating it to death asking for page after page of predictions. I don't have time, and nobody is going to pay me, to hack in SSL so it can become https. When FF stops allowing access to it, those users will just lose access to it.
Why shouldn't FF tell you that a site was saying "we are secure, really, just trust us", and why should it tell you that the http site you are visiting isn't making any claims of trust at all? That's the default for http, after all.
okay, which other system works well in a dense urban canyon?
Harris, Daniels, GE, Kenwood, Icom. Should I name more?
And, I'm sure you agree that the Motorola trunking radios don't work very well out in sparse country without repeaters.
No trunking system works ANYWHERE without repeaters. There has to be a control channel coming from somewhere or else it isn't trunked. Are you sure you know anything about modern radio systems?
By the way, what works better is to have different agency heads collocated so that they can coordinate while the people working actually work.
Right. It is so much better to create a JOC (joint operations center) and have "different agency heads" go there while the people in the field are dealing with a multi-car accident near the county border, and have all those "workers" talking to their own dispatch to relay communications. Sure.
Here A and B are the two regional inter-agency FM channels.
If you are in the US (the context I'm talking about) then there are a lot more than just two inter-agency channels. Go google for "VCALL" and see what comes up. There's five just in the high VHF band, and at least that many in every other band. And then google for "NIFOG" and download the PDF and look at all the information you can get from that. (Hint: the "I" in NIFOG is "interoperability".)
If you don't have those channels in place and instead rely on "Interagency A" and such nonstandard nomenclature and frequencies, then you are not truly prepared for the next big event, no matter how many years of experience you claim to have.
And if you don't have the repeater versions of the interop channels programmed in, then you're still behind the curve.
You do realize, of course, that Motorola has the only system that works well with a lot of users in urban canyons,
Are you a Motorola salesman? You must be, since this kind of marketing hype is patently absurd.
There are actual reasons different municipalities chose different systems,
Of course. I think I said it was "bad enough", which means that it is a necessary evil. Using multiple digital systems is not a necessary evil.
Oh, and the radios I have used had something like "inter-agency A" and "inter-agency B" programmed in.
That's nice. This works when A is using DMR and B is using P-25? No, I don't think so. Or when A is on UHF and B is on VHF? No? I didn't think so. The only way such programming works is if the radios can already operate on each other's systems, and in that case it is just as easy to program in the other agencies main frequencies and work there when necessary. A chase from A into B shouldn't require everyone involved changing channels to be able to communicate.
And I was pretty clear in talking about the interop channels, I thought. You don't need "Interagency A" as a special channel, just use VTAC11 or similar. Those radios you used did have those channels, right?
Nobody but you is talking about bribes. Marketing hype like your first sentence is how companies get lock-in, along with touting their extensions to the standards so no other company can truly compete. In our county here the main vendor is Moto, but we're using about four other vendor's radios without any problem at all. In fact, getting a programming error fixed is so much easier with every one of those other four that I cannot suss out why Motorola has any foothold at all.
Don't you think that keeping the conversation about movements and roadblocks secret might help in catching the suspects?
While many police agencies use this as an excuse for encrypting their radio traffic, it is very very rare for armed robbers to use police scanners to aid their escape.
I've had a police-capable radio in my car for many years, and I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of times it has allowed me to know ahead of time where the state police have set up radar on the interstate, for example. I have been able to hear about traffic problems before I get stuck in the middle of them, however. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was able to learn what the source of a series of explosions near my house was without having to call 911, and even more recently, that one of our town's major roads was shut down because of an event.
Do we really need to know every car that the police pull over?
Another common excuse used by the police to hide their radio traffic.
Most agencies these days have digital data systems for communicating private stuff, so there is no need to encrypt voice traffic. Not encrypting avoids the issues of key management and the inability of neighboring agencies to assist directly just beause they are not "keyed" properly.
but a lot of state/county and local public safety organizations including city police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo Motorola DMR digital standard.
Isn't it wonderful that the lessons of 9/11 and other major events is being lost in the push for more sales of commercial radio systems?
It's critical that first responders from different agencies be able to communicate with each other when a large event requires mutual aid. It is just as critical for neighboring agencies to be able to communicate on each other's systems when an event crosses a border. A first responder from county A who responds to something just over the border because he's closer shouldn't have to relay his communications through his dispatch to be able to talk to the resources coming from county B.
Motorola is making hay while the sun shines by selling P-25 systems, Mototurbo systems, and then bridges to link the two together, instead of using a single nationwide standard.
It's bad enough that agencies that use only 700MHz (and have single band radios) can't interop with agencies using legacy VHF or UHF systems, but Motorola profits from that, too. They'll happily sell multiple radios to solve this problem, and have each patrol vehicle or dispatch center carry two radios when one would do. And companies like Harris will gladly step in and sell $5000 portable multi-band radios.
Yes, there are nationally defined "interop" channels, but many agencies have no clue what they are (even a decade or more after they were created) or where to find them on their radios, if they are programmed to contain them. And if one agency has only the 700MHz "7CALL" etc available while the other has only the "VCALL" etc channels, those interop channels are useless.
And that body, my friend, is definitely the government.
I stand corrected, thank you.
The important point, however, is that this is not a criminal proceeding related to the blowing of a whistle, it is due to his failure to follow the ethical rules of the legal profession.
Somehow, by law, he was supposed to simultaneously blow the whistle on criminal activity, not participate in criminal activity, and not break the confidence of his "client" who was engaging in said criminal activity.
How is telling the people who are running the department you work for something they already know "break[ing] a confidence"?
As a lawyer, he had an ethical requirement to tell the people who were paying him that what they were doing was wrong, and not do it himself. That's breaking no confidences. Yes, it might result in him getting fired, but by not following the legal ethics rules he was breaking those rules and promoting the illegal activity. If the ethics were important, he'd not continue working there anyway.
Instead, he broke confidences by telling an outside party. That doesn't absolve him of the responsibility to tell his client of the problem.
It would appear that the ethical course of action would be to: 1) tell your employer/client, 2) quit because you really do value the ethics and not just pay lip service to them, and then 3) blow the whistle to the newspaper.
Proving once again that a whistleblower is almost ALWAYS screwed over no matter how they handle it.
This situation is a bit different than the vanilla whistleblower, in that he had an ethical obligation to discuss this issue with his employer/client because he is a lawyer. Had he been a run of the mill clerk, he'd not be in trouble with the bar association for breaking legal ethics. As a lawyer, he had a higher standard to keep, and didn't. Notice that it isn't the government acting against him, it is his professional organization.
Whoosh. Humans do make jokes, though. Like pretending that multiplying 200 by 3 is a really complicated task that takes logarithms and stuff. It must be, if labeling a package with such trivially easy numbers to multiply is "misleading".
or as... "this contains Y Calories per potion" if serviced as 4 potions on the label. That is misleading labeling and has nothing to do with understanding [c|C]alories.
"Calories per serving: 200. Servings per container: 3." How is this misleading? Eat the whole package and you have, umm, log 200 plus log 3, ten to that number... 603.93521 Calories. Easy peazy.
It's not meant to be incredibly precise or accurate. It's like the ballpark "pi equals 22/7". Good enough for lots of uses, ans especially good enough when you consider all the other factors that modify nutrition and diet.
Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?
What's a "realistic serving size"? What's realistic for you might be terribly small for me, and vice versa.
Yes, you could demand "per container" numbers, but then most people would still have to divide to get the "real" number.
What should be fixed is the odd situation where one container of a product can say "zero calories" and another, different sized one will say "5 calories".
Slashdot Mirror
if Gore had demanded a statewide recount then he would likely have won (there would have been less of a reason for the courts to step in)
Demanding a state-wide recount would not have changed the fact that Gore was trying to override the process already in place and agreed to, determined by the people who had the authority to determine the process, and would have pushed the second Florida vote certification past the date of the Electoral College. That would have disenfranchised every Florida voter.
The fact remains, SCOTUS did not "pick a winner", they told the loser that he had already had his recount and they could not overturn the constitutionally recognized authority of the Florida legislature to determine the process for selecting electors for the Electoral College in the state of Florida.
in exchange for a monopoly over a given geographical region,
Example, please? I keep looking for these exclusive franchise agreements and I can't find them. Every one of them I've looked at, and been involved in, has been non-exclusive.
but renegotiating them is tough.
They are contracts between the cable provider and the municipality, and they don't get "renegotiated" until near the end of the existing contract. Renegotiating them happens on a regular basis, it just may be a ten year cycle.
Their fixed costs would be lower because they wouldn't be spending money on producing or buying shows that don't have enough viewers to justify it. Supply and demand 101.
Failure number 3: just because you don't want to watch a certain channel doesn't mean nobody else wants to watch it. Cable companies buy product, so they don't save in production; they still have to pay the producers. Their costs don't go away just because you don't order a channel ala carte.
I've been 100% OTA for decades. I don't *need* to watch any particular show.
That's nice. You're now part of the group that pops up every time cable programming is discussed who tells us that we should just drop cable because you personally get by without it just fine. We're all glad that you get by with just OTA, but other people have other tastes and wants. I don't particularly like coffee, but I don't tell others how they ought to stop drinking it.
My experience with OTA is that I get 7 channels -- none of them major broadcast networks -- on a good day. Usually it is 5, and one of those is the public TV system rebroadcasting the public radio station. YMMV.
Cable companies in Sweden still wanting to bundle channels so that people have to pay for shows they don't want. Do YOU like to pay for something you don't want?
This demonstrates two misunderstandings of the system. First, what makes you think prices would go down if you got only the channels that you wanted to watch? They wouldn't. There are fixed costs that everyone has to cover. Add in the cost of changing the billing system to deal with ala carte, and the number of customer support people who would have to be hired to deal with billing errors and churn.
Second, everyone gets channels they don't watch in this system, so while you think you are paying to subsidize all the channels you don't like, so does everyone who watches those channels but not the ones you do like. Everyone thinks they're subsidizing each other, and in a sense they are. Remove the subsidies from everyone and everyone would pay the same. In fact, those who watch less popular channels would have to pay more since there would no longer be a subsidy from the others.
Someone else pointed out that even Netflix bundles, and the only counter to that was someone who pointed out how great Netflix was for other reasons, as if that excused the bundling.
Unfortunately, if you do ever get a cable system that only carries the popular stuff and doesn't force anyone to pay for things that nobody would watch, I suspect that you'll be unhappy. I'd bet that the things you like most are not the most popular channels. I can pretty much prove that. If you don't like what the OTA channels have on them, then every show they carry is an example of something that is popular with more people than what you want to watch. If what you wanted to watch was that popular, it would be on OTA. And no, public TV is not an example of this process, since public TV content is not determined by general popularity, it's determined by the popularity amongst donors.
Just go and ask them to let you use your TV's built-in ClearQAM tuner instead and see what they say!
Comcast will say "fine, connect all the digital-ready TVs you want to your cable connection." You'll be paying for access to programming you can't decrypt, and they'll have no maintenance issues with you because you are CPE and they don't have to fix any of that. You are almost pure profit for them!
Of course, when you call and ask where the "on demand" TV services are, they'll tell you that you don't get those because you need a settop box for that. Less demand on the servers, so you're still a profit for them.
WHY oh WHY would a cable company need to have the service staying up while I am not watching?
Also to keep the program guide updated.
Always wondered if the CC was using my boxes as Wireless access points, without my knowledge.
Very simple to check for yourself. Do any of your portable WiFi devices show a very strong signal on an unknown SSID when held near your cable box? But the set top box isn't the access point, it will be a cable modem supplied by the cable company.
Some departments use to have alternate channels that where not published before digital bands that they would switch to when needed.
All channels are published in the sense that you can search the FCC database for a geographic area and find out what is licensed for use. Yes, unlicensed use happens, but it is the exception not the rule.
"Can't handle the mail"? What does that even mean?
That means that the mail app I use (also K9) chokes when trying to access my mail email server. "Can't handle" seems like a good, non-technical description. It was intended to convey the idea that not only do I not use my phone for "checking mail", I cannot.
This statement shows poor thought processes. Calling 911 to get information about an event is a missus of 911.
And this statement shows a lack of reading comprehension. I didn't say I would call 911 to get information. I would call 911 to report a series of explosions -- except I found out what they were and that I didn't need to call by listening to unencrypted police radio traffic.
If you don't need immediate help don't call 911.
I think reporting explosions of unknown origin is a valid use of 911. You don't seem to think so. The large number of people who did call to report them disagree. The manager of the PSAP also disagrees with you. Nobody said that nobody should have reported them, they said that the fire department should have been proactive in informing the public they were going to happen. YYMV.
Not what I am talking about. The issue is suspects getting away because they can avoid police by knowing where the police are.
Yes, it is what you are talking about. If I, in a calm, quiet environment cannot determine where just one state police car is waiting with radar, why would you expect a robber, in the heat of pursuit, would be able to monitor and decipher the police communications better? But it's moot -- they don't do it anyway. Maybe because they understand that it isn't as valuable a source of data as you seem to think it is?
If it happens once a year it isa justification for encrypting year round.
Well, that's one opinion. Being able to monitor the activities of the police is a better justification for not encrypting at all.
Which means that there are some agencies who do not use digital systems and need encrypted communications.
No, it means that there are some agencies that use digital data terminals instead of transmitting everything via unencrypted voice signals. In other words, there is a solution to the "privacy" problem that doesn't require encryption of voice traffic. And "do not use digital systems" is irrelevant. Analog, digital, voice is voice.
True but that issue has been worked out long ago.
Textbook solutions are great, in theory, but do not always make it into practice, in practice. The issue of key management is much more complex than the issue of which subaudible tone or NAC (digital "tone") is used on a channel, and the latter is sometimes wrong. For example, a neighboring county changed a CTCSS tone on one of their channels and didn't tell anyone -- and it was only discovered when a local agency went to render mutual aid and couldn't communicate.
they just switch to an unencrypted channel.
So in the middle of an emergency event where you've called in outside assistance, everyone has to change channels, assuming that it becomes obvious that someone who cannot communicate with you cannot communicate with you.
The few times this happens does not make encryption useless.
Straw man. I didn't say it was useless.
it actively tries to impress upon the user that the https connection with a self signed certificate is worse than a plain text http connection,
But it doesn't make that comparison. It tells you when a site is saying "trust me because I say I'm trustworthy". It says nothing about a site that says "I'm making no claims at all about trust." That's not saying that one is better than the other, just that one is something that the user needs to know about ("hey, this is https so it's secure, right?") and the other is the default.
My position on this is that FF goes to great length to make it seem that an https connection with a self signed certificate is less secure than http,
That's not what it says. That's your inference because you forget that http says nothing about security at all. How can you be less secure than "none"?
And, at times, I use it as a NAP so my more capable tablet can be used for email or other network browsing.
Binge On benefits consumers and those content providers that choose to participate. This is a Good Thing. Getting rid of Binge On would change nothing for the providers who chose not to participate, so they get no benefit out of getting rid of it.
As for the "throttling", it is throttling that still supports streaming video while allowing other users and services access to the bandwidth. You're getting to do what the system was designed for. It isn't "download a really big file really fast so you can then spend an hour watching it...".
It would be better if they lowered the cost per gigabyte of metered data to something reasonable,
Since there are no overage charges for most customers, the "cost per gigabyte" is the cost of your data plan divided by the number of gigabytes you actually use. You can lower the "cost per gigabyte" yourself by downloading more data. If you say "but I'm using all the data I want already", then why would lowering the cost per gigabyte change anything? If you're not using all the data you want, use more. It don't cost nothin'.
I'd prefer my employer didn't know the contents of what I post to Slashdot.
So you use https://whatever.public.forum.... And your employer monitors your packets and sees a large number of packets to that address at times X, Y, and Z, and then scans the public forum for any posting close to time X, Y, and Z. They might see five different names at each time, but the intersection of those three sets will most likely be ... you.
Now, that evidence might not stand up in a court of law to convict you of anything, but your employer isn't going to care about that level of proof. You want to keep your employer from knowing what you are posting, you're already using a VPN, so the https part is irrelevant.
You can extend this to just about any forum where ideas are exchanged.
Not every website is a forum where ideas are exchanged. Not every website deals in personal or private data of any kind. Some websites are as simple as 'xtide', which allows you to select a location and a time and get back predicted tides. Pretty useful stuff.
I run an xtide server. I had to hack the source to put in a robots.txt so that indexers stopped beating it to death asking for page after page of predictions. I don't have time, and nobody is going to pay me, to hack in SSL so it can become https. When FF stops allowing access to it, those users will just lose access to it.
Why shouldn't FF tell you that a site was saying "we are secure, really, just trust us", and why should it tell you that the http site you are visiting isn't making any claims of trust at all? That's the default for http, after all.
okay, which other system works well in a dense urban canyon?
Harris, Daniels, GE, Kenwood, Icom. Should I name more?
And, I'm sure you agree that the Motorola trunking radios don't work very well out in sparse country without repeaters.
No trunking system works ANYWHERE without repeaters. There has to be a control channel coming from somewhere or else it isn't trunked. Are you sure you know anything about modern radio systems?
By the way, what works better is to have different agency heads collocated so that they can coordinate while the people working actually work.
Right. It is so much better to create a JOC (joint operations center) and have "different agency heads" go there while the people in the field are dealing with a multi-car accident near the county border, and have all those "workers" talking to their own dispatch to relay communications. Sure.
Here A and B are the two regional inter-agency FM channels.
If you are in the US (the context I'm talking about) then there are a lot more than just two inter-agency channels. Go google for "VCALL" and see what comes up. There's five just in the high VHF band, and at least that many in every other band. And then google for "NIFOG" and download the PDF and look at all the information you can get from that. (Hint: the "I" in NIFOG is "interoperability".)
If you don't have those channels in place and instead rely on "Interagency A" and such nonstandard nomenclature and frequencies, then you are not truly prepared for the next big event, no matter how many years of experience you claim to have.
And if you don't have the repeater versions of the interop channels programmed in, then you're still behind the curve.
You do realize, of course, that Motorola has the only system that works well with a lot of users in urban canyons,
Are you a Motorola salesman? You must be, since this kind of marketing hype is patently absurd.
There are actual reasons different municipalities chose different systems,
Of course. I think I said it was "bad enough", which means that it is a necessary evil. Using multiple digital systems is not a necessary evil.
Oh, and the radios I have used had something like "inter-agency A" and "inter-agency B" programmed in.
That's nice. This works when A is using DMR and B is using P-25? No, I don't think so. Or when A is on UHF and B is on VHF? No? I didn't think so. The only way such programming works is if the radios can already operate on each other's systems, and in that case it is just as easy to program in the other agencies main frequencies and work there when necessary. A chase from A into B shouldn't require everyone involved changing channels to be able to communicate.
And I was pretty clear in talking about the interop channels, I thought. You don't need "Interagency A" as a special channel, just use VTAC11 or similar. Those radios you used did have those channels, right?
Nobody but you is talking about bribes. Marketing hype like your first sentence is how companies get lock-in, along with touting their extensions to the standards so no other company can truly compete. In our county here the main vendor is Moto, but we're using about four other vendor's radios without any problem at all. In fact, getting a programming error fixed is so much easier with every one of those other four that I cannot suss out why Motorola has any foothold at all.
Where do you live that the police are elected?
The chief of police in this city is hired by the elected city council. The county Sheriff is directly elected by the public.
Don't you think that keeping the conversation about movements and roadblocks secret might help in catching the suspects?
While many police agencies use this as an excuse for encrypting their radio traffic, it is very very rare for armed robbers to use police scanners to aid their escape.
I've had a police-capable radio in my car for many years, and I can count on the fingers of no hands the number of times it has allowed me to know ahead of time where the state police have set up radar on the interstate, for example. I have been able to hear about traffic problems before I get stuck in the middle of them, however. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was able to learn what the source of a series of explosions near my house was without having to call 911, and even more recently, that one of our town's major roads was shut down because of an event.
Do we really need to know every car that the police pull over?
Another common excuse used by the police to hide their radio traffic.
Most agencies these days have digital data systems for communicating private stuff, so there is no need to encrypt voice traffic. Not encrypting avoids the issues of key management and the inability of neighboring agencies to assist directly just beause they are not "keyed" properly.
but a lot of state/county and local public safety organizations including city police dispatch channels are using Mototrbo Motorola DMR digital standard.
Isn't it wonderful that the lessons of 9/11 and other major events is being lost in the push for more sales of commercial radio systems?
It's critical that first responders from different agencies be able to communicate with each other when a large event requires mutual aid. It is just as critical for neighboring agencies to be able to communicate on each other's systems when an event crosses a border. A first responder from county A who responds to something just over the border because he's closer shouldn't have to relay his communications through his dispatch to be able to talk to the resources coming from county B.
Motorola is making hay while the sun shines by selling P-25 systems, Mototurbo systems, and then bridges to link the two together, instead of using a single nationwide standard.
It's bad enough that agencies that use only 700MHz (and have single band radios) can't interop with agencies using legacy VHF or UHF systems, but Motorola profits from that, too. They'll happily sell multiple radios to solve this problem, and have each patrol vehicle or dispatch center carry two radios when one would do. And companies like Harris will gladly step in and sell $5000 portable multi-band radios.
Yes, there are nationally defined "interop" channels, but many agencies have no clue what they are (even a decade or more after they were created) or where to find them on their radios, if they are programmed to contain them. And if one agency has only the 700MHz "7CALL" etc available while the other has only the "VCALL" etc channels, those interop channels are useless.
Once you quit you have no credibility with the newspaper as then you are just a disgruntled ex-employee.
And the newspaper would care exactly why? The allure of being the next Woodward or Bernstein is too strong. And it was the Bush administration.
And that body, my friend, is definitely the government.
I stand corrected, thank you.
The important point, however, is that this is not a criminal proceeding related to the blowing of a whistle, it is due to his failure to follow the ethical rules of the legal profession.
A decent president would be quick to sign a pardon and put this to rest.
He can be pardoned for criminal activity, but the bar association can still disbar him for it.
Somehow, by law, he was supposed to simultaneously blow the whistle on criminal activity, not participate in criminal activity, and not break the confidence of his "client" who was engaging in said criminal activity.
How is telling the people who are running the department you work for something they already know "break[ing] a confidence"?
As a lawyer, he had an ethical requirement to tell the people who were paying him that what they were doing was wrong, and not do it himself. That's breaking no confidences. Yes, it might result in him getting fired, but by not following the legal ethics rules he was breaking those rules and promoting the illegal activity. If the ethics were important, he'd not continue working there anyway.
Instead, he broke confidences by telling an outside party. That doesn't absolve him of the responsibility to tell his client of the problem.
It would appear that the ethical course of action would be to: 1) tell your employer/client, 2) quit because you really do value the ethics and not just pay lip service to them, and then 3) blow the whistle to the newspaper.
Proving once again that a whistleblower is almost ALWAYS screwed over no matter how they handle it.
This situation is a bit different than the vanilla whistleblower, in that he had an ethical obligation to discuss this issue with his employer/client because he is a lawyer. Had he been a run of the mill clerk, he'd not be in trouble with the bar association for breaking legal ethics. As a lawyer, he had a higher standard to keep, and didn't. Notice that it isn't the government acting against him, it is his professional organization.
Whoosh. Humans do make jokes, though. Like pretending that multiplying 200 by 3 is a really complicated task that takes logarithms and stuff. It must be, if labeling a package with such trivially easy numbers to multiply is "misleading".
or as ... "this contains Y Calories per potion" if serviced as 4 potions on the label. That is misleading labeling and has nothing to do with understanding [c|C]alories.
"Calories per serving: 200. Servings per container: 3." How is this misleading? Eat the whole package and you have, umm, log 200 plus log 3, ten to that number ... 603.93521 Calories. Easy peazy.
It's not meant to be incredibly precise or accurate. It's like the ballpark "pi equals 22/7". Good enough for lots of uses, ans especially good enough when you consider all the other factors that modify nutrition and diet.
Sure people should just be smart enough to do the math, but is it really too much to ask that food producers use realistic serving sizes?
What's a "realistic serving size"? What's realistic for you might be terribly small for me, and vice versa.
Yes, you could demand "per container" numbers, but then most people would still have to divide to get the "real" number.
What should be fixed is the odd situation where one container of a product can say "zero calories" and another, different sized one will say "5 calories".